Apps drive Central Florida businesses, schools

Mark Hawks has sold Apple products for the past 20 years, but the popularity of mobile applications has his career heading in a different direction.

"My clients kept telling me they needed iPhone apps to make their businesses better, so I started taking classes in app development at Seminole State College," said Hawks, 53, of Port Orange, who already has sold his first app to a Kentucky chiropractor.

His second one, he said, "will be a guide to better living, showing good food choices, exercises and also a direct line to my [Lake Mary] chiropractor."

A boom in apps — tiny programs for smartphones and other mobile devices that do everything from creating games to crunching financial spreadsheets — is creating new opportunities for Central Florida businesses and schools.

Already established builders are welcoming novice developers into Central Florida's flourishing tech industry, advising them that there's more to building an app than just the colorful icon that appears on a device's screen.

At the same time, the University of Central Florida, Valencia College, Full Sail University and other schools are offering more app-development courses.

"Businesses are eager to move their customers from the Web to their mobile devices, and apps facilitate the transition," said Dick Grant, professor of information technology at Seminole State College.

A report from Elance, a California-based online work platform, shows U.S. demand for workers equipped to create apps for Apple devices soared by 457 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 in comparison with same time last year. The demand for developers with Android skills jumped 224 percent, the report shows.

"There is a lot of hand-holding and educating the client in the process of creating an app," said Rainer Flor, creative director at Orlando-based Echo Interaction Group. "The client usually has no idea what they are getting into. It's our job to guide them through the process and tell them what their app will eventually accomplish."

Flor said app building really begins with conversations with a client about what they want the app to accomplish.

"Do they want to engage an audience, enhance their business, solve a problem or be the first to offer something innovative?" he said. "We also have to consider how to build the app for future updates."

Before any programming begins, developers create an outline that details the goals of an app and a storyboard on paper — not unlike those drawn in the movie industry — that gives glimpses of the proposed app.

Tweaks and other modifications are scribbled on paper before a more detailed storyboard containing dozens of images that show each function of the app is presented to the graphic designers and programmers.

When the app is coded and all graphics installed, the developer submits the app to Apple. Technicians at Apple check each line of code to make sure the app meets Apple's strict guidelines. Graphic content is also evaluated before Apple agrees to place the app in its App Store.

The whole process can take six to eight weeks or longer if Apple returns the app for reprogramming. Some developers said publishing apps to Google's Android Market is akin to the "Wild West" because there is no approval process or standards to meet.

It's difficult to gauge the cost of building an app because of their wide range of complexity. Games, for example, require greater graphic-design hours, and that will considerably increase the cost. A report from Internet Retailer, a technology trade publication, shows quality apps can cost $30,000 to $100,000 to design, program and publish.

Jason Madsen, program manager at Full Sail University in Winter Park, said the future of app development in Central Florida is strong because there is "so much movement and excitement."

"We have a strong [app]-development community here that gets together and collaborates," Madsen said. "It's a great opportunity for our talent to get involved with this now to really take advantage of it."